


Godzilla Recycles

by ckret2



Series: Red Sprite & the Golden Ones (Rodorah slowburn oneshots) [14]
Category: Godzilla (2014), Godzilla - All Media Types, Godzilla: King of The Monsters (2019)
Genre: "humans squinting in confusion at kaiju" basically, (The ship isn't in the fic but it's mentioned), Gen, Intermission, Kaiju, Languages and Linguistics, POV Outsider, Recap, Snapshots, semi humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-27 09:10:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21389689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: It’s been more than a month since the reawakening of the titans. In that time, they’ve been a constant fixture in the world’s news headlines. But... generally not for the expected reasons. More for things like starring in YouTube language lessons, stealing cars, and recycling their plastic.Featuring the exciting news headlines:• Heart of Monarch Found Alive• Ghidorah Roosts off East Coast of Mexico, Avoids Further Destruction• Preliminary Fluid Dynamic Analysis of Air Currents in Joint Landing Between Titanus Rodan and Monster Zero• Titans Explore Landscape: Most Human Interactions Peaceful• "Language of the Big Birds"? Monarch Releases Titan Language Lessons Starring Rodan, Ghidorah• Indonesian Infant Islanders Vindicated: "Goddess" Mothra Comes Home• Titanic Rosetta Stone? Monarch Translates Rodan, Mothra Conversation• Ghidorah Returns to Boston, Live Updates: One Injured. Explores Rubble, Interacts With Humans.• Monarch Issues Red Alert: Ghidorah and Rodan Moving South Over Atlantic• Godzilla Recycles• Godzilla's Real Name: "Sweet Fish"?
Relationships: King Ghidorah/Rodan
Series: Red Sprite & the Golden Ones (Rodorah slowburn oneshots) [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1476800
Comments: 10
Kudos: 112





	Godzilla Recycles

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of an ongoing series of Rodorah one-shots. It’s not ABOUT Rodorah but mentions of the ship are made—mainly from humans that don't know what's going on but think going "lol the big monsters that almost killed us are dating" is funny; but also some from Godzilla and Mothra, who are trying to figure out what the hell Ghidorah is up to on Isla de Mara.
> 
> If you don’t wanna read the other fics in the series... tbh this sorta sums up a lot of the stuff that’s been going on in them, just from the perspective of the baffled human witnesses. All you really need to know going in is that Ghidorah (grudgingly) yielded the battle before he otherwise would have killed Mothra, and it's all AU from there.

## HEART OF MONARCH FOUND ALIVE

Throughout the titans' mass awakening, every news station, site, and paper in the world was filled with towering headlines screaming about the monsters crawling and careening across Earth's vast landscapes. Each and every individual titan had hundreds of live streams in both video and text, constantly updating the terrified world on the latest actions of the monsters storming through their cities.

The greatest number of cameras stalked Ghidorah and Godzilla's every dread-inspiring move, not just because anything that happened to the United States east coast always seemed to get disproportionate coverage, but also because someone had leaked intel revealing that Ghidorah had awakened the rest of the titans and appeared to be commanding them. Anyone dealing directly with a titan attack tracked their own beast's news, of course; but for the parts of the world situated between the attacks, watching clouds roiling far too fast overhead and listening to their homes rattle from earthquakes hundreds of miles away—their eyes darted between news about whatever nearest creature might menace them and news coming out of Boston about the titans’ supposed ringleader, waiting to see what was going to happen next.

In the aftermath of the fighting, for days there wasn’t a major paper or station that had a story that didn’t somehow feature titans, whether directly or tangentially. Every eye in the world was gazing fearfully into the distance, waiting fearfully for some several-hundred-foot-tall beast to lumber over the horizon.

And so it was somehow both amazing and completely understandable that the news totally ignored that Serizawa Ishiro had been found alive in Boston.

He was located the second morning after the fight. He was unconscious on the northern shore of Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor, within easy sight of the spot where the final titan battle had been fought. He was evacuated to the nearest operational hospital to receive treatment for exposure, dehydration, and what a week earlier might have been misdiagnosed as one bitch of a sunburn but which by then the doctors could unfortunately easily identify as radiation burns. It was another day before he was identified, and from there only a few hours before the room was full of balloons and flowers sent by dozens of Monarch employees. He hadn't woken up yet, but he was stable and expected to recover, and when he _did_ wake up he was going to know he was appreciated.

Monarch had no idea how he'd survived. Godzilla must have saved him, everyone agreed; the leading theory was that Godzilla had stuck Serizawa in his mouth moments before the bomb exploded, driven some unknown godzillish instinct, to release him somewhere safe when he arrived in Boston just before attacking Ghidorah—and that was only the leading theory because nobody could come up with any others. (Rick Stanton's proposal that the explosion had opened up a vacuum-powered tunnel between Godzilla's lair and Boston was rejected out of hand.) Serizawa couldn't explain as long as he was unconscious, and Godzilla himself certainly wasn't going to tell them anything. But whatever had happened, they were grateful it had.

Serizawa's survival didn't make headlines; who was Serizawa to the world but another one of the many talking heads that sometimes spoke for Monarch, and not even the most frequently seen one at that? Only a few articles were devoted to his miraculous discovery, and most of them were in more specialized publications geared toward biologists, environmentalists, or titanologists. In most places, he was a two-sentence comment near the end of a longer article about Monarch's response to the tragedies or Boston's clean up efforts.  


But the world was still reeling from the damage, struggling to sift through the rubble for any little signs to reassure them that this could have been a lot worse and that from now on, things could start to get better.

For Monarch, finding Serizawa alive was their sign.

## GHIDORAH ROOSTS OFF EAST COAST OF MEXICO, AVOIDS FURTHER DESTRUCTION

For many others, their sign was Isla de Mara.

After the battle in Boston, when Rodan and Ghidorah began their slow flight south, Monarch was sure that they were going to head to Isla de Mara. Monarch operatives were surrounding the island when they arrived. The titans’ trajectory had been calculated, their arrival anticipated, and—although Monarch had no idea what they could actually _do_ when the titans arrived—Monarch was sure to be there, all the same. If for no other reason than to document.

The town was still all but empty—under quarantine by the Mexican government. Rescuers were working their way through town, looking for bodies or survivors that hadn't joined the initial evacuation, in toppled buildings or buried by pyroclastic flow; but nearly everyone who could be removed from the island had been.

All the same, there was a perceptible tension over the quiet radio lines as the two titans descended into view through the clouds of volcanic ash. Just their arrival stirred tumult, kicking up clouds of previously-settled ash and rubble. Monarch and the few rescuers in the town braced themselves for hurricane-force winds to blow through what was left of the town, knocking over already-damaged buildings.

They didn't.

Although the ash on the volcano churned in the air around the two titans, not so much as a breeze stirred in the town below.

Then the titans were settled, Rodan sinking into his crater as comfortably as a vacationer into a jacuzzi, Ghidorah clinging to the side of the volcano like a bat.

And when the news got out, the world let out a tense sigh of relief. That was the sign everyone had been waiting for: the sign that, at least for now, this was really over.

## PRELIMINARY FLUID DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF AIR CURRENTS IN JOINT LANDING BETWEEN TITANUS RODAN AND MONSTER ZERO

It took days of analyzing Monarch's footage of Rodan and Ghidorah landing before a pack of fascinated aerodynamicists with expertise in computational fluid dynamics could run a proper simulation demonstrating how their wings affected the air. What the simulation revealed was that Rodan's landing _should_ have blown devastating wind into the town below. However, Ghidorah's landing, facing directly across from Rodan and wings tilted at just the right angle, had pushed the air currents back the other way—effectively turning the force of Rodan's flaps out to sea.

And furthermore, they said it wasn't accidental. They had abundant footage now from the first time Ghidorah had landed on Isla de Mara, from his various takeoffs and landings in Boston, and from the few times he'd left and returned to Isla de Mara without being accompanied by Rodan. That wasn't how Ghidorah usually landed.

It was, however, what he had done when Rodan landed; and it was what he did in subsequent days every time Rodan returned to his volcano, until Rodan began habitually landing on the north side of the volcano instead.

The paper was released as a messy rough draft directly online, bypassing journalistic publication entirely to make it as easy as possible for everyone who might be concerned to get to the findings; in the aftermath of the titan attacks, the authors had the patience neither for peer review nor for the slow publication process and paywalls blocking off most of their usual journals. To everyone who read the preliminary paper—mainly titanologists and other aerodynamicists—the thought of a flying creature so consciously and precisely manipulating air currents like that was absolutely mind-boggling.__

Even more mind-boggling was the thought that _Ghidorah_ had bothered to do it.

Why?

## TITANS EXPLORE LANDSCAPE: MOST HUMAN INTERACTIONS PEACEFUL

Over and over, they were discovering just how alarmingly clever the titans were. More than once, Kraken had camouflaged itself as a capsized ship, tentacles pressed together in the shape of a hull, just to splash any boats that came close to investigate and disappear beneath the sea, like it was playing a game with humans. Behemoth, on his way back down from Boston to Rio de Janeiro, had stopped in Guatemala to observe a construction site, waited there until the panicked workers decided he wasn't going to attack and returned to work, and then, after watching them a bit, had started doing the crane's job by picking up steel beams and putting them in place.

As articles about the damage, the deaths, and the global response to the tragedies began to receive smaller and less dire headlines, the articles about the titans' frightening and fascinating intelligence began popping up—usually not making front page news, but popping up regularly on page 2. Cell phone videos racked up millions of views.

Scylla had etched deep grooves in strange shapes in Death Valley before heading north; a few days later, the MUTO passed through, stopped and studied the grooves, before turning north as well. Which meant they were, what, a map? Instructions? It at least indicated that titans were capable of communicating with abstract symbols—that was ninety percent of the way to writing. It further suggested that the titans had language, _mutually intelligible_ language.

Many of Monarch's employees already suspected as much; the titans vocalized at each other so much, it was completely plausible that they'd developed the capacity for speech.  


They didn't expect the theory to be confirmed so blatantly.

## "LANGUAGE OF THE BIG BIRDS"? MONARCH RELEASES TITAN LANGUAGE LESSONS STARRING RODAN, GHIDORAH

Outpost 56-B, which had been cobbled together within hours of Ghidorah's landing on Isla de Mara, consisted of five permanent employees, three trailers, two porta-potties, eleven (and decreasing) drones, forty cameras, one satellite, and one big red button to radio the Armada de México in case of dragon-shaped emergency. Along with the full-time employees, they had fifteen part-timers they'd hired from among the people slowly returning to town: fourteen to help monitor the titans through the cameras 24/7, and one to bike in from town with lunch each day. The outpost was stationed just north of the still-standing portions of the town of Isla de Mara, near the very edge of the volcanic rock that had been spilled when Rodan emerged. (They used to have four trailers, but the one that had been standing on volcanic rock had been kicked into town by Ghidorah. They took that to mean they weren't allowed to step on the rock.)

Outpost 56-B was surpassed for Monarch's most pathetic outpost only by Outpost 75-B, which consisted of two motorboats, a pair of walkie-talkies, a generous Airbnb stipend, and a rechargeable flashlight with a cord that, they'd discovered too late, wasn't compatible with Sudanese power outlets.  


And yet, for what a ramshackle little operation Outpost 56-B was, it had been the one to provide proof of titan language. And god, what proof! They had recorded evidence of a _giant pteranodon_ giving _language lessons_ to a _three-headed alien dragon._ Slowly, and carefully; gesturing to each object or performing each action before giving the word; saying each word clearly, several times; using them in simple sentences based on previous vocabulary, each word kept separate and distinct. 

Consequently, Monarch was learning Rodan's language alongside Ghidorah. So far, they had eighteen nouns, seven verbs, five adjectives, a catch-all question word that seemed to mean "who," "what," "when," and "where" all together, the words for "yes" and "no," and one interjection that seemed to mean "look at me" or "pay attention." They knew that Rodan had words for compass directions—two of them, anyway—and that his language conflated the concept of "west" with "up" and of "east" with "down" into only two words. They had Rodan's name for Ghidorah—and Rodan's name for _himself,_ a three-part carrying "_Rrrr-DAAA-nnn_" cry that they immediately identified as the probable source of the remarkably consistent name that cultures around the world assigned members of _Titanus Rodan_. Had this one Rodan been spotted in so many locations? Or had he given Ghidorah his species name rather than his personal name? Did members of Rodan's species _have_ personal names?

Very soon, they might be able to ask him.

Outpost 56-B started a YouTube channel, titled it "lenguaje de los pájaros titánicos (para principiantes)" and started uploading videos with both Spanish and English subtitles for anyone who couldn't work out the translations just by watching Rodan. (When Monarch HQ emailed to complain that 56-B had to _ask_ before declassifying that kind of material, they kept posting videos, blurred out the extremely easily identifiable titans' faces, and emailed back to request a third porta-potty.) There were human beings, alive today, all over the planet, learning alongside _a literal alien_ how to understand a titan's language.

Over the next couple of weeks, while every titan's face battled for screen time on every major news station, Godzilla's and Ghidorah's gradually appeared less and less on North American stations as the recently-averted apocalypse became old news and full-blown sapient _speaking_ life found off the coast of the Mexico-U.S. border became the new hot story. Between his face flashing on every major news station over headlines about titan language as talking heads speculated about the possibility of complex titan civilizations, and a wave of Tamaulipeco defenders eager to claim Rodan as a state symbol who were ready to point out that most of the damage on and around Isla de Mara had actually been caused by the U.S. military, Rodan was now the most popular titan on Earth. 

And then he made a trip to Infant Island.

## INDONESIAN INFANT ISLANDERS VINDICATED: "GODDESS" MOTHRA COMES HOME

Many articles mentioned the fact that after the battle, Mothra had retreated to a small island in the Indonesian archipelago. Some of them even mentioned the name Infant Island.  


Very few outside of local and specialist publications discussed that the Infant Islanders were reveling in the fact that their previously derided "local folkloric" claim to having been the home of a goddess had been very recently validated when Godzilla ferried Mothra straight to their island, where she settled down into a well-worn groove in the middle of town square as though she'd never left it. One reason this news was under-reported probably had to do with the fact that they refused to let reporters on the island, fearful that it would become trampled as a new tourist destination; and the threatening psychic weight of Mothra's mind pressing down on any presumptuous reporters approaching in boats hoping to be the exception deterred those who tried to defy the ban. Instead, they arranged for interviews off island or online, and provided any requested pictures of Mothra—when she agreed, of course.

The only outsiders who had been allowed on the island had been the Chen twins, accepted as valid representatives for Mothra. Although their island still had descendants from the line of twin sisters that Mothra had gifted them, they had no living twins from that line. Mothra had already promised them that their next generation of children would have twin daughters. In the meantime, visiting twins from another of Mothra's nests were... well... acceptable, the Islanders supposed. They hastily established rules about how much the Chen twins could report to outsiders about the island and its people and culture, which they faithfully followed. (Even as much as it killed legend collector Ilene to not immediately ask a million questions about what stories they'd passed down about Mothra.)

They were, however, allowed to transcribe any of Mothra's telepathic conversations with visiting titans into Mandarin as long as she herself permitted it—and she did continue to permit it—and so it was when Rodan arrived to have a long, apparently one-sided conversation with Mothra.

## TITANIC ROSETTA STONE? MONARCH TRANSLATES RODAN, MOTHRA CONVERSATION

It wasn't quite as cut-and-dry as Rodan's accidental language lessons; especially since there were parts of the conversation where Mothra had sought out information straight from Rodan's mind that the Chen twins couldn't make any sense of—except that Rodan’s thoughts had something to do with a very interesting hug-like display on Isla de Mara from the day before, and that they were rotten with fear.

(The “hug” from Ghidorah to Rodan—if that was what it was—was already infamous in Monarch. The 56-B team had eagerly circulated it throughout Monarch yesterday in the form of a several-second video that was set to the cheesiest pop song they could find and covered in heart emojis. Shortly before they’d uploaded the same video—without authorization—to their official Twitter and TikTok accounts. Stories about Rodan were beginning to pop up not just under news sites' World sections, but also under Entertainment. It was a jarring sight, considering how many of those stories also featured an alien dragon that had recently tried to destroy the world.)

But despite not having a word-for-word translation, Rodan's conversation with Mothra and its Mandarin translation did offer the possibility of a rosetta stone with which they could decipher far more about his language. Comparing his language lessons with Ghidorah to his conversation with Mothra was like comparing day one of a college Spanish 1 class to _Don Quixote_. It was a huge leap forward toward the day—which now seemed not like a possibility but an inevitability—when they would be able to pipe sentences in Rodan's language through a speaker and have a real conversation with him.

Rodan's trip to Infant Island _should_ have been the most noteworthy titan news of the day.

But noteworthy news was nearly impossible to predict.

## GHIDORAH RETURNS TO BOSTON, LIVE UPDATES: ONE INJURED. EXPLORES RUBBLE, INTERACTS WITH HUMANS.

Two hours before Rodan's conversation with Mothra, the eyes of half the planet had been glued to a constant live news stream coming out of the United States, as one local station after another trained its cameras toward the skies, following Ghidorah as he headed north. The world dreaded that the moment Rodan left him unsupervised, he'd decided to pick up exactly where he'd left off. It seemed that he’d even returned to Boston specifically to continue his apocalypse.

Instead, he stole a speaker and a car, made fun of the U.S. Army, complied with some demolitionists' request to help them take down a building, and went home.

After that, the far more academic matter of a new jump forward in titan linguistics was relegated to a small article on Monarch's official titan tracking website.

## MONARCH ISSUES RED ALERT: GHIDORAH AND RODAN MOVING SOUTH OVER ATLANTIC

Another example of the unpredictability of newsworthy items:

Rodan—along with Ghidorah—was back in the news later that evening for what the 56-B crew was insistently calling a "lovers' spat," a brief skirmish that ended with Ghidorah literally storming off to Antarctica and Rodan charging into the hurricane after him.

For several hours, the world was braced, yet again, for the potential end of the world.

But before the next morning, it was clear that the skirmish was going to end with no further loss of human life—even the four Monarch employees stationed in what was left of Outpost 32 had evacuated long before Ghidorah had arrived to sweep the ruins into the very hole he'd emerged from. Coasts in the southern hemisphere on both sides of the Atlantic were hit with vicious waves as Ghidorah's hurricane passed by, but nothing that threatened seaside homes, and the worst they got in the way of weather was strong drizzles and stiff breezes. Satellite monitoring, a few absurdly far-off jets, and the evacuated Antarctic Monarch employees squinting through the blizzard caught fuzzy lightning-lit glimpses of another terrible titanic battle; but by the time anyone was close enough to record the fighting properly, it had ended with the two titans sitting on the coast of Antarctica together, having another language lesson.

(Outpost 56-B demanded that HQ send them the footage so that they could update their YouTube channel. HQ refused to do so until they'd reviewed the footage themselves. A traitor within the ranks sent 56-B the footage anyway, and the world was graced with the knowledge of Rodan's word for "snow.")

But despite the fact that the turbulence from Isla de Mara ultimately ended up having all of the newsworthy appeal of celebrity relationship drama, it still received far more coverage than the _real_ breaking news happening halfway around the world:

## GODZILLA RECYCLES

In the town of Kuta, on the island of Bali, in Indonesia, was the Ngurah Rai International Airport.

Godzilla had been harassing it for the last two weeks.

The airport crossed nearly the entire length of a peninsula, its runway jutting out into the sea to the west and to the east only separated from water by a strip of trees hardly a fifth of a mile wide. Kuta Beach stretched out along the coast both north and south of the runway. Located an equal distance away from the outposts that had contained titans "Typhon" and "Bunyip," Kuta was untouched by the recent attacks; but the beaches were still oddly barren, as the tourism that would usually be ramping up this time of year was reduced due to the vast swathes of the human population that had to instead turn their resources to recovering from the recent attacks. Still, there were some tourists out on Kuta Beach—enough that, when Godzilla's dorsal plates rose out of the ocean to the west, the wave of people running east to avoid him could be veritably classified as a stampede.

As Godzilla approached the Ngurah Rai International Airport, every airplane that hadn't taken off was grounded and those coming in were frantically redirected to nearby islands. He lumbered straight up to the side of the runway, feet still in the water of the beach as he leaned over the runway, dropped a massive pile of nets, and promptly turned around and returned to the ocean.

The airport shut down all operations and called Monarch.

As Serizawa, the world's only true Godzilla expert, was still in a coma, Monarch had to guess at what he'd say about Godzilla's strange behavior. They decided that Serizawa would probably say he was trying to restore Earth's natural order, which probably included dealing with its pollution; so Godzilla was returning human detritus to whom it belonged—the humans—so that they could properly clean up their own mess.

So the airport waited a day, removed the nets with a hazmat crew, and the next day was cautiously back in business.

And a day later, Godzilla was back with another delivery of nets. When he reached the spot where he'd dropped his first pile, he paused, looked around, and then climbed onto the runway and stormed along the length of it, apparently looking for his original stash. He pushed aside airplanes and bent over to peer into hangars and terminals, where terrified travelers who thought they'd be safer inside stared back at him. Eventually he gave up and, with a roar of frustration, sank back underwater.

This time, Monarch decided they were pretty terrible at roleplaying as Serizawa and advised the airport to leave the nets be.

They pushed the nets to the very corner of the airport grounds, near where Godzilla had left them and still out in the open but off of the runway itself. They stank. Apology signs were posted on the nearby beach and the tourists moved further south.

The third time Godzilla visited, he graciously accepted their relocation, added his new nets, and left in peace.

After several more such trips, he showed up in the middle of the night with a new piece of cargo: Mothra, riding on his back, her wings—one whole, one tattered since the battle in Boston—raised high.

A monarch ship, with the Chen twins on board, followed close behind, ready and eager to find out from Mothra just what in the hell Godzilla was doing with the nets.

Whatever the titans talked about on their way to Bali, Monarch had been too far away to hear. But now that they were on land and speaking to each other, in roars and in telepathy, the Chen twins began translating and transcribing their conversation:

"It's ugly," Godzilla said, "But I think it will work."

Mothra had climbed off of his back and onto the airport grounds, and was prodding at the pile of nets with one leg. _I'm not so sure_.

"We can try it! It'll be fine."

_Why are we so close to humans?_ Mothra turned toward the airport, which was one again closed. At least at this time of night there were far fewer travelers. _They're nervous._

"This is the only place with flat enough ground." He jerked his head toward the runway. "Lay down with your wing on the flat strip. I'll trace it."

Someone had produced some spotlights—Monarch didn't know who, they weren't working with _them_—and pointed it at the titans. Mothra had gestured for them to point the light down at the runway instead. Although whoever was behind the lights apparently didn't have enough sense to not shine a giant flashlight in a couple of city-destroying monsters' faces, they _did_ at least have enough sense to listen when the less destructive one made a request, and pointed the light down. It shined off of Mothra's good wing as she maneuvered herself onto her back and lay it flat on the runway.

Godzilla knelt next to her and very carefully traced around the wing with a claw, scraping a gouge into the concrete. "I've melted the humans' floating weeds before," he said, and Mothra silently clarified to the Chen twins that he _was_ referring to the nets. He did have a word for nets, but the word didn't convey his disdain for them the way "floating weeds" did. "If you get enough of it together, when it cools, it makes a solid layer. We just have to make a barrier around the outline and melt the weeds in it. The hard part is making a barrier that won't melt or catch fire. I still don't know what to use, but we can probably find something nearby. Maybe we can make glass on the beach."

_Why don't you make a flat layer from the floating weeds without a barrier and then cut a wing shape out of it?_

Godzilla stopped halfway through tracing Mothra's wing, looked at the gouge he'd already carved into the runway, and said, "I guess that would be easier."

As they dragged the nets onto the runway, Mothra said, _Rodan visited today._

Godzilla's head jerked up. "Has the freak tried to kill him yet?"

_No._

"Is he being mind controlled?"

_I'm not sure. I don't think so_—he_ doesn't think so—but I don't know._

Godzilla let out a low, displeased grumble. "What's going on over there?"

And Mothra didn't know—not for sure—so, for a moment, they were both silent. They finished piling the nets together in the middle of the runway. Godzilla's dorsal plates began glowing—not their usual piercingly bright blue, but a very dull glow that flickered near the bases of his plates like he was trying unsteadily to keep his power low. The light traveled far slower than usual up his back. He opened his mouth halfway as the light neared his head.

Finally, uncertainly, Mothra said, _I think they might like Rodan._

Godzilla's plates flashed nearly white. He hacked out a ball of blue light, then let out a cough that rattled windows.

_Sorry._

"Timing!" Godzilla looked at the bit at the edge of the nets that had been incinerated, whined, and started gearing up for another, more controlled burst. To the Chen twins' surprise, the conversation continued; apparently either Godzilla was also telepathic, or could simply think thoughts that Mothra could translate as easily as his usual speech. _What do you mean, "like"? As a mate? As a meal? As something to beat up?_

(Someone on the Monarch ship made a mental note to call up Mark and tell him that Godzilla _also_ wasn't sure whether Ghidorah was looking to Rodan for food, a fight, or a fuck.)

_As a mate_, Mothra said. _Or a friend? Something positive. Something social. Either they like him, or they're trying to trick Rodan into liking them—and if it's the latter, I don't know what they're after._

_If it's not the latter?_ This time, Godzilla got it right. His atomic breath looked more like the flame of an oversized bunsen burner: translucent blue, mostly steady, faintly flickering. He began slowly melting down the massive pile of fishing nets.

_If they really do like him... then I still don't know what they're after. I have no idea what someone from another world thinks mating is for._

_You'll have a better idea than any of us. You're the only one that's been to other planets._

(Ling Chen clapped both hands over her mouth and let out a long, quiet, high-pitched noise. The Monarch employees, watching an automatic google-translated English copy of the conversation going up on the ship's main screen as Ilene and Ling typed it up in Mandarin, each silently flipped their shit in their own personal ways. One shouted "No!" Someone else just slid out of her chair to the floor, quietly repeating, "Oh my god." Another kicked over a waste bin, laced his hands in his hair, and stared at the ceiling, overcome with emotion. )

_I've never been to their planet,_ Mothra said. _I don't know what to expect. But, I think that it means that we're safe. For now._

_For now._ The nets were now a massive greyish-orange-teal ooze stretching out along the runway. Godzilla shut his mouth and straightened up. The grass sizzled where the nets ran over the side of the runway. "For now—as long as the freak stays interested in Rodan. And as long as Rodan doesn't turn him down. And as long as another Rodan doesn't hatch and try to mate him. And as long as Rodan remains alive."

(Ling made notes differentiating between the two different words Godzilla was using that she and her sister were both putting down as "Rodan" in their transcriptions: "Rodan (personal name; untranslatable?)" versus "Rodan (species name; 'volcano bird/pteranodon')." Ilene came back and changed "volcano bird/pteranodon," with a tiny smirk, to the English "volcanic roc.")

_More or less_, Mothra said.

"Then we should kill him while he's got his guard down."

_Rodan will defend them._

"Then we get backup before we go."

_You don't want to have to kill Rodan._

"No! I don't! But if it's between him dying or our whole world, I'll rip his head off!" Trees trembled with the force of Godzilla's roar. "If it's only a matter of time before the freak wants to destroy the world again, then we shouldn't wait around until he decides to. We can't let him make the first attack. It only takes him a few seconds to seize every mind on the planet. What if he gets _me_ next time?"

_I'd save you, Godzilla._

(Although Ilene wrote "Godzilla" in her transcription, she almost absent-mindedly included a parenthetical translation for the name that Mothra was really calling him. The watching Monarch employees were once again thrown into paroxysms of shocked disbelief.)

Godzilla was silent for a moment. "I know you would," he said. "That's not the point. The point is, we lost to him last time. We might not be able to beat him unless we take him by surprise. But you don't want to, do you? Why?"

Mothra didn't reply immediately. Instead, she lay back down, laying her wing along the length of the solid sheet of nylon on the runway. Godzilla started tracing around it with a claw tip again. _What if they can change?_ she finally asked. _Maybe we don't have to fight them again. Maybe this is a chance to get them to integrate into this world. Maybe they'll have a chance to heal_.

(Underneath the word "heal" was this sense of massive, dark wounds, damage that felt as deep and ancient as Earth's very tectonic plates—something broken in Ghidorah's psyche that still ground together painfully inside him, spawning earthquakes and jagged mountains and chasmic trenches and volcanic explosions in his soul. The feeling was so strong and so dark that Ilene briefly had to stop typing, pressing a hand over her aching heart. Ling did her best to transcribe it, but ended up with only a string of characters that translated vaguely like "pain break scar wound darkness psychic hurt trauma?")

"Healing is the exact opposite of the thing I want to help him do."

_I know. But if we can—wouldn't that be safer for the world? If we fight again, even if we win, people will die._

"Only small people."

Mothra ignored him. _And that's _if_ we win. They probably would have won last time if they hadn't gone to Rodan. If we don't have to fight them at all, wouldn't that be better for keeping the world safe?_

Godzilla made a low growl that the Chens couldn't figure out how to translate any way other than "Noise of grudging resignation." He straightened up. "Okay, your new wing's cut out."

Mothra rolled over, Godzilla pried the wing off of the runway with a creaking cracking sound, and turned it around to hold it up to the remains of her injured wing.

_How are you going to attach it?_

Godzilla broke off another piece of plastic from the runway, held it on the other side of her damaged wing, and said, "I'm going to melt it a little bit to seal around your wing."

For a creature without anything in the way of human facial muscles, Mothra pulled off a very convincing look of utter disbelief.

"It might burn a little," he told her.

_Okay_, she said, resigned. _Fine. I guess it can't make it worse. Do it._

She let out a long, shrill hissing noise as he melted the end of the new wing and the opposite piece of plastic together around the remains of her damaged wing, and both Chens' faces screwed up in pain. When it was done, Godzilla held her wing until it had completely cooled, and then stepped back. "Okay," he said. "Try it out."

She moved her new wing up and down slowly. _It's light_, she said. She attempted to flap it.

On the second flap, it snapped in half. Mothra and Godzilla both watched as the tip arced high in the air, flew off into the distance, and landed half a mile away standing up in the sand of Kuta Beach.

They looked at each other.

"We'll figure out how to fix it tomorrow," Godzilla said.

Mothra climbed onto his back. He trudged over to the broken wing, handed it to her to hold, and sank back into the ocean to swim Mothra back to Infant Island.

Although Godzilla's plastic-recycling jump into the brave new future of environmental conservationism was all but ignored by the media, in several days, one tiny detail out of the Chen twins' transcription of their conversation caught the fickle eye of mass media. A new headline dominated countless news sites' front pages:

## GODZILLA'S REAL NAME: "SWEET FISH"?

Most of the articles were accompanied by an image of Godzilla photoshopped next to a pile of red Swedish Fish candy.

**Author's Note:**

> Original post available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/187457455612/godzilla-recycles). Comments/reblogs there are very welcome (as are comments here)!
> 
> Some notes:
> 
> • Rodan's name for _himself_, a three-part carrying "_Rrrr-DAAA-nnn_" cry that they immediately identified as the probable source of the remarkably consistent name that cultures around the world assigned members of _Titanus Rodan_.  
I intended for this to sound like a MonsterVerse version of Rodan's original/historical three-part roar [as described here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR85cpjx3oM). So whatever Rodan's giving as his name in his own language, to human ears it _sounds_ kinda like "rrr-daa-n" and also like the traditional Rodan roar.
> 
> • Had this one Rodan been spotted in so many locations? Or had he given Ghidorah his species name rather than his personal name? Did members of Rodan's species _have_ personal names?  
To be clear: all of this speculation is incorrect. All members of Rodan's species have personal names; all the names sound very distinct to each other in their own language, but human ears that can't hear the nuances hear them all as "rrr-daa-nn."
> 
> • Outpost 56-B started a YouTube channel, titled it "lenguaje de los pájaros titánicos (para principiantes)"  
For those of you that _don't_ casually open a second tab to plug phrases into Google Translate in the middl of a fic, that's "language of the titanic birds (for beginners)". The phrase "lenguaje de los pájaros"/"language of the birds" most commonly refers to a medieval mythic/folkloric divine language supposedly spoken by angels and/or birds, and is referenced in tales & myths where humans that can understand birds are granted boons or birds pass on vast wisdom to those worthy enough to hear them. Considering the semi-deifying awe that titans seem to be treated with MonsterVerse, comparing Rodan's language to a mythological tongue that's one part animal and one part divine seemed fitting.
> 
> • The "SWEET FISH" joke is a reference to [Cuckoo](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21305465), where Mothra names Godzilla "Sweetiefish" in a moment of panic.


End file.
